Ding dong the garden is dead!

We had a great weekend. I really enjoyed getting to watch General Conference as a family. This is one of the first times that all of our boys have sat and "listened" to conference with us. After the morning session, we went outside and enjoyed the sunny afternoon. Our poor garden bit the dust with the hard frost we got earlier in the week, so the boys had a hay day popping peppers, chopping up squash and throwing tomatoes at the ground. It was so funny to watch them! We are sad that our growing season is over. We were able to salvage about half a cooler full of mostly green tomatoes that we hope will ripen. Our garden produced very well for us this year. Our most successful plants were our yellow peppers and our out of control squash! Our zucchini didn't start to produce really well until right before the frost...it kind of got taken over by the squash. We've never really been able to grow good sized bell peppers and this year, for the first time, we had some really beautiful ones. When we planted the garden, we weren't really sure how it was going to do in that spot so it was a trial year. I was able to can way more than I ever have and we are excited to have these items this winter. Next year (so we can remember), we plan to extend the garden to the fence, plant less yellow peppers, and put our tomatoes in cages so the ground has a chance to dry out.

finding peppers.

Landon was more into football than destroying garden vegetables.

Travis anticipating the pop and pepper juice. He later found out that if you get pepper juice on your hands and face it stings A LOT! We did lots of scrubbing after they were all done.

This is what we canned this year: 7 pints of pickled peppers (we seriously could have done a TON more of these but we didn't love the texture of them), around 40 pints of salsa, 14 quarts of tomatoes, seven quarts each of peaches and pears and 12 half pints of choke cherry jelly!

On a side note, Carson came home today with an awesome award for reading and turning in a summer reading log. He also got a certificate for $10 to use at the book fair this week! He is super excited to get to spend it! Way to go, Carson!!

Landon has a game that he loves to play. He will make a happy face and then a sad face. It's so funny to watch him say happy and then make the face and then say sad and make that face! He is a character!!